The Films Proving That Animation Is Alive

Welcome! This is a new Sunday issue of the Animation Obsessive newsletter. Here’s the slate:

• 1. Noteworthy films at Ottawa.
• 2. Animation newsbits.
• 3. The last word.

Now, let’s go!

1. Six standouts

Each year, an animation festival takes place in Canada. It’s the main one in North America, and among the most prestigious anywhere.

It’s held in the city of Ottawa, and its full title (the Ottawa International Animation Festival) is just a little unwieldy to type. In the animation world, though, people casually refer to the event by its initials or even first name. Which is to say: it’s a big deal.

This week, Ottawa happened again. And this edition was especially important — it marked the festival’s 50th year. The organizers screened 50 Canadian films from across time, worked on a museum show of Canadian animation and more.

Yet the core spirit of the event stayed the same. It’s a venue for new animation, and often for the stuff that doesn’t break into the mainstream. For left-field animators in Canada, and in all countries, it’s a chance to be seen. And we were fortunate enough to catch some of the highlights remotely.

There was remarkable work on display at Ottawa 2026. What we saw is evidence that animation, for all the struggles it faces right now, still has serious energy left.

Canadian animation has a rich, rich history. That history continued at this year’s Ottawa Festival, where many of the best films came from Canada.

Student animation was in that group. Take Seeing Hands (2026) by Penakee Das, a psychedelic, largely abstract piece with intriguing textures and colors. It feels linked to Canadian greats like Norman McLaren, but it remains its own thing. If you can take flashing images, Das has shared a YouTube copy on his site.

Another student-film gem was Expo Inferno (2026) by Maxine Lawrence. It received an honorable mention at the festival, and for good reason.

Its premise grabbed us right away. In a gray future, Canada’s government uses projected holograms to resurrect Expo 67, a touchstone moment for the country. You watch a visitor walk through ghostly images from the 1960s. Then the projector catches fire, and the exhibition dissolves into orange and red.

It’s a haunting piece with a point. By email, Lawrence explained, “I wanted to express feelings of grief and longing for lost futures.” Her late grandfather had gone to Expo 67 and told her about his time there. For all its problems, she noted, the exhibition was “a grand humanist project that celebrated culture and art with an optimistic vision of the future.” Famously, that project included animation.

Lawrence spent eight months on Expo Inferno and did tons of research to recreate Expo 67’s layout. Inspired by the ideas of André Bazin, Hayao Miyazaki and Isao Takahata, she was aiming to build a sense of “continuous space,” in part through “shots with many elements in a single frame.”

And her production methods were unusually analog — cels, 16 mm film and a multiplane camera stand with several sheets of glass. As Lawrence wrote:

The character animation was done in Blender using Grease Pencil and then printed onto cels. I hand-painted the cels with some help from friends. … The backgrounds were collage drawings printed onto cels with watercolor paintings layered underneath. …Once I had all of the cels and backgrounds finished, I started filming them on my multiplane with a 16 mm Bolex camera. For shots with camera movements, I very slowly moved the multiplane levels, often in increments as little as one millimeter at a time. Most shots required multiple exposures, so I would have to carefully rewind the film in the camera, reset the multiplane and shoot the scene again. Once the entire reel was shot, I mailed it to a lab for processing and scanning.The last step of production was the film-burning sequence at the end. I took some old 8 mm reels of Expo 67 and loaded them into a malfunctioning projector that allowed me to distort and melt the film.

Even as new as Lawrence is to animation, you can feel the depth of her reference points in Expo Inferno. She freely mentions artists like the Hubleys, Berthold Bartosch and Jacques Tati, and she told us that portions of her film were modeled on the mid-century documentaries of the National Film Board of Canada. Expo Inferno has no online footprint yet, but it’s one to watch for.

Speaking of the National Film Board, it had a sizable presence at Ottawa 2026. Among others, the venerable studio brought Knowing Gaze, in its world premiere. That was another honorable-mention recipient, and it impressed us this week.

It’s not an easy film to pin down. In an email, director Dylan Glynn called it the “most elaborate, robust and realized work” so far in his “ongoing series … satirizing gay life.” Knowing Gaze is very honest and very pointed, and it’s packed with true-to-life details that rarely appear in films. Glynn wrote, “[O]ur unique and ever-evolving culture is a constant source of inspiration, in all its messiness.”

His film flows between different styles of animation and storytelling (structured narrative, stray vignettes, poetic scenes) without going esoteric: the transitions feel natural. And all of it swirls around Berk, a guy with no spoken lines, whose arrogance and looks exert a gravitational pull over the central cast. Berk is clearly bad news — he’s compared at one point to the Minotaur — but he’s inescapable. (“So, his feed is only selfies, in bare face, in gym apparel,” one character observes.)

It took around three years to pull together Knowing Gaze. Here’s Glynn:

Working with the National Film Board is a series of consecutive contracts from proof-of-concept, to development, to production. My proof-of-concept stage focused mostly on writing and recording the dialogue and monologues in the film. The self-aware, “half-joking” tone was important to establish from the very beginning, so I would record all the dialogue to demonstrate the delivery of all the lines.In development we focused on stringing the separate vignettes into a fluid plotline of interconnected characters. I also organized the visual style at this stage. The film goes from a harsh, crude and cold digital style to a warmer, tactile paint-on-glass stop-motion technique. How to transition between these two seemingly opposing aesthetics was The Aesthetic Problem to solve, but luckily it’s the type of problem I relish overanalyzing endlessly. …A typical production day is something like… me sleeping in too late, coffee and sweet treat around 10–11 a.m. [and] getting to my studio past noon, putting a dent in the quotidian task at hand, going to the gym, freelance lunch hour (4 p.m. — I’m ravenous by then), then more work. At this point in the day I actually feel awake (I am a nocturnal animal) and can usually work quite peacefully for a few hours. If the task is something more tedious like coloring or in-betweening, I might have Real Housewives playing on the second monitor.

Ottawa has a history of honoring foreign films alongside Canadian ones. The 2026 grand prizes went to Taiwanese and Japanese projects, and there were winners from Georgia, Estonia and beyond. Meanwhile, we got a lot out of the films in the Detours section, focused on “animation from unexpected corners of the globe.”

One of its selections, It’s Quiet Now (2026), came from Kosovo. Its subject is a conflict from 25 years ago in North Macedonia, and the families who escaped.

Nothing much happens; the film doesn’t try to shock. But there’s gunfire in the distance, and a sense of urgency to reach the bus to the city. Director Flaka Kokolli and her team worked from real accounts, which led to real detail. “Do I really need all this?” the lead character wonders, as she packs her bag. “Ajvar probably won’t be as tasty if I don’t make it with these spoons.”

Kosovar animation was unexpected, for sure. We were even more surprised, though, to find a film from Angola in the Detours lineup. It’s called Plans (2026), and it’s set to a beautiful song by singer Paulo Flores. We enjoyed it quite a bit.

The short opens on a driver in the municipality of Maianga. Stopped at a light, he drifts off to Flores’s song — and “escapes into his own memories,” explained director Jesualdo Muvuma. This song was the project’s origin. “[Plans] came from my desire to translate some of the feelings and images that the song evoked in me into a visual language,” he wrote. It’s a mix of live-action footage and animation, and the images have a floating feel and painted, textured depth that suit the track.

Muvuma started Plans through the Ateliê Mutamba residency and got funding partly from a Portuguese foundation. He told us that his country’s animation scene is “very embryonic,” but that people are out there. At his studio Mwiloo, he’s trying to build up Angolan animation:

One of its purposes is to contribute to the training of new professionals and, in the medium term, to develop a production structure dedicated to animated cinema. I want Mwiloo to become not only a studio for producing my own work, but also a space where other artists can develop their ideas and where we can gradually build a professional community around animation.I’ve been particularly happy with the reception my films have received internationally. Not only Plans, but also my other animated works have made people outside Angola curious to learn more about the country, its culture and its creative context. For me, that is one of the most interesting aspects of making these films: they can act as a small gateway into Angola.We are still at the beginning of this journey, but I believe there is room to build a real animation industry here.

It was in the Detours section, too, that we watched maybe our film of the festival.

Back in 2022, we learned about a project in development called The Day I Smoked a Cigarette with My Father. Its title and concept images were so strong that we covered it at the time. Luckily, this Egyptian-French-Belgian film got finished. Having finally seen it, we can confirm that it lives up to its promise.

The story opens in 1959, in Cairo. A father is taken from his family’s home by the police in the night. He has communist ties.

When he’s freed a few years later, his return is mundane in a way that feels extremely real. He shows up unannounced, and his children are kind of muted toward him; his oldest son is even angry. He speaks to them as if nothing has changed, and begins hunting for an old box of parts, and goes to fix his bicycle.

It’s presented with wide and medium shots in a style akin to Italian neorealism — but mixed with tight closeups on faces, eyes, mouths, hands, bicycle pedals. This adds to its documentary focus on details (that word again), which came from life.

Sameh Alaa, writer and co-director, was drawing on family stories. As he told us:

The film was inspired by my family, specifically my grandfather’s story of coming home after being away for six years. It was a story that wasn’t really talked about in the family. Around six years ago, my father suddenly told me about that day while we were watching TV together. Most of the story comes from what he told me, although I invented and changed many things for the film.The boy in the story is also my father when he was a teenager. So, in a way, the film is my grandfather and my father’s story, but it’s also my story with my father. I’ve lived away from my family for a long time, so the idea of coming home has always meant something to me. At the same time, I wanted the story to go beyond my own family. For me, it’s about fathers and sons, misunderstanding, the gap between generations, acceptance and finding a way to hold each other’s hands through a difficult life. …What interests me most in characters is their psychological journey and the things they don’t say. I like using animation, visuals and sound to explore those unspoken feelings rather than explaining everything through dialogue or big dramatic moments.Many of the small details are based on reality. For example, the box of scrap metal was something my grandfather really wanted to find when he came back because he needed to sell it and buy food for his children. I love these small slices of life.

Detours was an out-of-competition category; The Day I Smoked a Cigarette with My Father wasn’t eligible for an award. But it was definitely among the strongest pieces at the Ottawa Festival in 2026, and we hope that lots of people get to watch it from here.

Ottawa wrapped up over the weekend with an award ceremony, and a closing party, and final screenings of the winning films. On Saturday, the people behind the festival chose The Big Snit (1985) as their favorite Canadian animated short of the past 50 years — which, for such an iconic piece, makes sense.

Half a century in, OIAF could’ve shown only classics and past winners (The Street, Crac, A Country Doctor) and taken a victory lap this year. It’s an institution by now, and lots of people would’ve attended regardless.

It didn’t do that, though. The team paid tribute to the past, but it also showed why the city of Ottawa remains so key to animators now. The festival still feels young; it’s still open to out-of-the-ordinary work from around the world. And, judging by The Day I Smoked a Cigarette with My Father and other films mentioned today, the momentum may well exist for a second 50-year run.

2. Newsbits

• Check out the American film I Was a Witch’s Familiar (2021), newly on YouTube. Director Dave Merson Hess is a talented collage animator, and he created mesmerizing images in this multiplane film.
• The classic Czech film Song of the Prairie (1949), directed by Jiří Trnka, is getting bundled into Deaf Crocodile’s restored release of Soda Pop Joe (1964). A big step in the resurgence of Trnka’s work.
• American animator Bill Plympton did a music video for the rapper Your Old Droog. Asked in the comments how he made it happen, Droog replied, “I paid him.”
• The French preschool series Trotro & Zaza has been a hit on TV and streaming this year; France Télévisions calls it a “record launch” for its children’s projects. This comes as the broadcaster battles a wider downturn in the country’s TV and movie business.
• Back in the ‘90s, the American film The Iron Giant proved how effective a blend of 3D models and 2D drawings could be. Now, one of the Iron Giant’s own, original model files seems to have appeared online.
• A proposed bill in America would offer a 20–30% tax credit to animated projects that keep at least 75% of labor expenses inside the country. Jamie Lang of Cartoon Brew notes that this “could be a significant job creator.”
• In China, All Wishes Come True has had an abnormally long, two-month run in the top spots at the box office. Its revenue is now nearing 2 billion yuan (around $298 million).
• The American filmmaker Jonni Pepper-GoLions is getting her features released on Blu-ray through the new label Video Visions. The first, Wasteland, arrives in late 2026. See the label’s full slate here.
• Also: Jonni just wrote about Niu Lai, Chinese underground animation and more for our newsletter.

3. Last word

Hope you’ve enjoyed today’s issue! We’re closing out with personal comments from the two of us:

John: Covering animation festivals is one of the trickier things we do here; in the past, it’s led to some of our toughest issues. But I’m happy to say that this one was pretty seamless, largely thanks to Christina of the Ottawa team (who made it possible for us to follow the event remotely) and the generosity of the filmmakers (who gave us great answers on short notice). We really appreciate it. I’m coming away from Ottawa kind of encouraged — despite the headwinds facing animation right now, there are still people out there creating thoughtful, original, human work.

Jules: This week, I’ve been reading the 16th-century epic Orlando Furioso. I first came across it while looking for pre-20th-century stories that feature characters traveling to the moon (which it does). Contrary to the stereotype of books from the period, it’s definitely not a dry read — it has near-constant adventure and is full of humor, action and invention. Orlando isn’t as well known today as it once was, but it reportedly influenced writers all the way from Shakespeare and Cervantes to Lord Byron and Virginia Woolf, just to name a few. (There’s even a copy of the book that passed from the ownership of Jane Austen to Woolf, signed by both.) I don’t believe it’s ever received an animated adaptation, but I was struck by its similarity to Lotte Reiniger’s Prince Achmed, which may or may not be a coincidence. Either way, I think the huge imagination in Orlando would serve anyone looking for a story to animate!

Until next time!

See this Instagram post by the Ottawa Festival.